


Furious Angels

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-22
Updated: 2008-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:11:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And I want to run like the blood from a wound, and if you go, furious angels will bring you back to me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Furious Angels

**Author's Note:**

> Set pre-series! Canon-compliant for City of Bones and City of Ashes only.

-

 

They're at a service station just beyond the tollbooths that let them across the border into France when Jocelyn realizes that her tender breasts have absolutely nothing to do with the new, black-laced bodice she'd worn for the Accords.

"Oh, _shit,"_ she says, startling a woman who was looking through the selection of wrapped breakfast crepes not too far from her. Then, "shit!" she says again, because it doesn't make her feel better, but it sure does momentarily hold back the feeling that the world is going to chasm open from beneath her at any time.

Jocelyn hasn't slept in she doesn't know how long, and it's been just a little over twelve hours since she's become an exiled Shadowhunter, a widow, and an orphan all at once (and an ex-mother. Is there a word for that? Widow for someone who's lost their spouse, orphan for someone who's lost both parents, but is there a word for a woman who's held the tiny, knit, charred bones of her firstborn son and screamed and screamed and screamed until Luke had to haul her up onto his shoulders and carry her off like a sack of potatoes before the Clave caught up with her? There should be. The pain of losing a child is incomprehensibly worse than all the others combined.)

The service station carries condoms behind the counter, but it doesn't carry pregnancy tests, and for this Jocelyn is almost glad. Pretending this all Wasn't Happening had been a great strategy so far and she didn't want to break that fragile construct.

"Are you all right?" Luke asks her, later, handing her a small, bulbous bottle of Orangina; she has to set down the bundle of Jonathan's things in order to hold it, which had been the point, she thinks. Somewhere behind them, the sun is setting, shattering low on the horizon, and she thinks fleeing into the night is a little cliché.

"That's a dumb question," she answers, because she doesn't have the strength to lie. She sheds the jacket he'd given her and balls it up to pillow it between her head and the window pane.

 

By the time Luke checks them into a hotel in Paris just before dawn, Jocelyn has gone straight past grieved and exhausted and right into giddy.

There are a lot of things he's not telling her, she knows, the least of which being why he was even here with her at all, but he's maybe the one person who understands immediately what she's really saying when she tells him she's pregnant. Again.

She means, _Valentine will not touch this child._

And it doesn't even _begin_ to make up for ... for _everything_ else, doesn't even stir the waters, but it feels enough like a victory to keep Jocelyn's senses from knocking themselves out of her skull.

And then Luke cordially offers to marry her, and she sighs, because some old-fashioned traditions just needed to hurry up and die already.

 

Jocelyn took some French in school, but most of what she knew she picked up from Maryse, who had a tendency to revert to it whenever she was cross or excited. She reasons she knows enough of it to get by in Paris for awhile. It's not a bad place to be, assuming the glamour on her papers and passport doesn't wear out and cause her no end of trouble.

She thinks she might rent an apartment somewhere where she can see Montmartre from her window, lit up against the night sky from atop its hill and looking like it had been dropped into the middle of the city from some lost century without so much as a whoopsy-daisy. It's easy to imagine herself sitting at a long window with a wrought iron grate and trailing flowers, painting at her easel while people meandered along the cobblestone streets underneath her. Expensive, too. She frowns. She doesn't know if the Clave will let her access her funds anymore. Technically, they were hers and Valentine's, and therein lay all the problems.

She's caught by surprise when Luke turns to her -- almost right after she told him to go his separate way, leave her alone, so long and thanks for all the fish, etc and so on -- and says vibrantly, "Have you ever been up the Eiffel Tower?"

"No," she blinks at him. Between training to be a Shadowhunter and being the wife of a megalomaniac who ran experiments on little children -- his own and those of his closest friends -- she didn't have much time for sight-seeing, and she's pretty sure he knows that, too, so she wonders what the catch is.

"Right then," he says seriously, grabbing her hand -- the same way he'd done when they were nineteen and could call themselves the two people Valentine loved most in the world and now was _not_ the time to be remembering that -- and pulling her towards the car. "First things first."

 

The very top of the Eiffel Tower is crowded, and Jocelyn doesn't have the energy to fight for a space amongst the clamoring tourists at the tiny little windows, so she sits on one of the benches by the elevator that will take them back down to the protests of their popping ears. The thick column beside her is layered in signatures; some barely visible in ballpoint pen, scribbled hastily and out of sight of the people who are supposed to stop this kind of thing, some in blazing silver Sharpie. Dozens of names that could be from hundreds of languages. The names of people who have stood so close to the sky and wanted to prove to somebody, anybody, that they'd even been here at all.

She's much calmer on the second floor, where there is fresh air to breathe and she is still high enough off the ground that not a single noise drifts up to her from the noisy Paris streets.

Luke leans onto the railing beside her. They're wearing matching shirts, because only Luke would go to a department store sale and buy three pairs of the exact same thing, and he'd known in that instinctive way that those plotting murder and mutiny do that she was going to need a change of clothes after the massacre at the Accords. The cold, whistling breeze lifts the soft, button-down fabric off of her skin, and she rests her hip against Luke's for a moment, saying nothing.

Clouds roll in from the west, bringing a drizzling, sullen kind of rain with it, and Jocelyn watches it fall in sheets across the city -- the sun still shines, golden warm, in some places, and she looks but can't find a rainbow. She imagines that the rain is thicker, greyer than most, that it is choked with the ashes coming from Idris, that the people down below shaking raindrops out of their hair are scattering what remains of her parents, her home, her husband, her son; the bits and pieces that weren't substantial enough to be given to the Silent Brothers in the Bone City.

"Are you all right?" Luke asks her, voice low, the way people speak in libraries and in funeral homes.

They're close enough that when she turns to him, his nose brushes against her cheek and she can feel the rush of his breath against the sensitive flesh of her upper lip. The wind picks at her loose hair, and he catches it between his fingers, where it tangles around him like the thin filaments caterpillars use when weaving their cocoons. He tucks it back behind her ear.

She thinks of asking him to buy her something from the gift shop on this floor, or of taking him to the restaurant on the floor below (it still baffles her, that they can fit a restaurant onto the Eiffel Tower -- what a bitch it must be to get supplies and ingredients up here), or saying yes, she'll marry him, for the memories of once upon a time, back when the Circle was something good, something warm, something to come home to at night.

Valentine's voice rings inside her skull, _We are the children of the Angel, Jocelyn, so why can't we FLY?_

_That's exactly what I'm doing,_ she replies quietly. And it means Luke cannot come with her; she will shed him the way she will shed her scars. (It won't work, of course. If she has a son, she'll name him Luke. No matter .... no matter what.)

"Yes," she says, simply, swallowing the rest of her words, and while the rain falls on Paris, he looks at her with eyes the color of thunderclouds.

 

-  
fin


End file.
